Sewing Tutorial: Putting together your Quiet Book pages to make a book

You've spent hours cutting out little felt shapes, positioning them on pages, sewing, stitching on faces and finishing touches and now you have the pages all made for your Quiet Book. Well done! It's no easy task. No doubt plenty of patience, glasses of wine and cups of tea have passed between you and your Quiet Book pages. So let's take a look at one way to put it all together and make a book out of what you've got in front of you.

Work out the order of your pages and then pair them up in front to back pairs. Put them right sides together. Sew around with approximately 1cm/0.5 inch seam, leaving a gap wide enough for turning out the right way. Trim the corners as in the picture below.

Turn out the right way and push the corners out to neaten. It should look something like this:

Then sew a top-stitch a few millimetres from the edge to neaten it off and close off the opening.

Covers can be made in the same way (you'll need front and back covers):

• right sides together
• sew around, leaving an opening
• trim corners
• turn out the right way
• topstitch edges

I like to add a button tab to my cover. The length and width depend on the thickness and size of your book. Cut two rectangles, allowing a 0.5cm/0.25 inch seam and follow the same steps as above.

Of course there are loads of options for putting your pages together, but my favourite way is to use binder rings. I then sew two buttonholes on each page where I want to place them. Easy! Especially if your sewing machine does automatic buttonholes as mine does :-)

Sewing tutorial: Quiet book pages - Bead counter

This is one page I really like to include in my books. Both of my kids love counting and one of their favourite pages in their quiet book is the bead counter. They enjoy moving the beads across, and they also learn their colours by practicing with the beads. It is an easy and effective page.

The starting point for making the page is deciding how wide to make the counter (then cut your thin ribbon in appropriate lengths), to what number to count to (in my larger books, I have include counters that go up to ten), and finally what colours to choose. 

The ribbon I use is very narrow and I do not like to take any chances with safety with beads coming loose, so my first step is to space the ribbons on the page and sew them to the page background. My green felt is about 1.5cm wide, so I sew along the ribbons for about a length of 1cm on one side first. Then I thread my beads on and sew down on the other side to secure the ribbons down and lock the beads in. 

Place the felt lengths over the ribbon ends where you have sewn and pin down. Sew a stitch around the edges. Finally trim off the threads and ribbon ends and your bead counter is done!

Part III - Shapes Quiet Book

Here is the third kind of Quiet Book that I finished over the last week. It's the Shapes activity book.

The Triangle page has a cute little tent which opens with a zipper to a little sleeping bag, also opening with a zipper.

Next is the Rectangle page which uses velcro to match colours and sizes. Next time I might do a sky background and make it look like a cityscape.

The Square page has the pieces of a house that stick on with velcro. Just the square pieces can be taken off.

The Circle page has a bus with wheels that come off (velcro again, but next time I'll use buttons to add some variety). The Oval page is the cute little chicken in a egg page that I've used in a couple of my other books.

The Diamond page is a little puzzle.

You can find my other two books here:
http://richesandroses.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/part-ii-alphabet-quiet-book.html
http://richesandroses.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/finished-four-new-sets-of-quiet-books.html

And a closer look at the Shapes book in my Etsy shop:
https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/167005046/toddler-quiet-book-shapes-theme?

Finished - four new sets of quiet books! Instalment one: Counting

Last night I felt like I had accomplished something big. It's taken several weeks of half an hour per evening to get these eight quiet books (two in each of the four new designs - counting, alphabet, colours and shapes) finished. 

Miss almost 3 loves counting. Almost to the point of obsession at the moment. We're a bilingual family and she now manages to get to 13 in both English and German. Most numbers beyond 13 come out something that sounds a lot like sixteen. Anyway, the point of that is that her bead counter is her favourite page in the Quiet Book that I made her more than a year ago. I wanted to find a way to include one in this counting book, so I decided to just go up to five.

One shoe... two people...

And my two favourite pages: three animal finger puppets and four balloons.

And finally, five fish!

Check it out in more detail in my etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/167004470/toddler-quiet-book-counting-theme? and stay tuned for some patterns and instructions in the coming months.

Lesley :)

Works in progress: Quiet Books (Alphabet, Counting, Colours, Shapes)

So much cutting out....

It's taken me a bunch of evenings in front of the television to get all of these little shapes cut out, and my scissor hand is very tired.

I started out by drawing each picture (in mirror image) onto the heat and bond lite paper and then ironed it onto the felt sheets. The following pieces will all go into my counting book.

Here are the pieces for the shapes book:

And these will all go into the alphabet book...

Finally, we have the pieces for the colours book!

Next I'll arrange the pages, peel off the paper and iron the pieces onto the pages.

I can't wait :)